Racing: Maiden ride helps exorcise demons

Paxton Conder leads Panella and apprentice rider Anna Jones at the Hastings meeting soon after her maiden ride. Photo / Anendra Singh

Amateur jockey Paxton Conder couldn't stop the tears streaming down her face yesterday in Hastings.

Conder didn't have the foggiest idea where she finished on I'll'ava'alf in the field of 13 in the Hawke's Bay Raceday meeting and, it seemed, neither did she care as she sat at the foyer of the jockeys' changing rooms in the bowels of the Hylton Smith Members' Stand.

It was shortly after her maiden gallops race, the $7000 Duke of Gloucester Cup Amateur Prelude over 2000m at midday, which Wanganui livestock farmer Scott MacNab had won on The Big Opal.

It was more than just the raw emotion of finishing the maiden race that had got to the 20-year-old from Matamata.

Conder was returning from a broken neck last year. The medical advice was clear - abandon any equine ambitions, after the C1 vertebra had snapped on August 28.

"I was steeplechasing while schooling at home," she said yesterday, revisiting that grim moment in Matamata.

"We were just coming in a bit too quick and he [I'll'ava'alf], clipped the top and went down so I landed on my head and broke my C1," Conder said, pointing to the base of her neck, "somewhere here where it's not supposed to snap".

It's at that juncture that tears welled in Conder's eyes and her words became muffled. The question was pertaining to what-ifs had she lost her mount to flirt with a life without much mobility or even death.

"And that was what was in my head today when I lost my stirrup. I knew I couldn't fall off. I needed to keep going," she said, crying and laughing.

The rider in emerald green-and-white silks had lost her footing in the stirrup on I'll'ava'alf "right at the beginning" and got it back at the 1200m mark.

"I was certainly not prepared for that one."

Conder was simply determined to get her foot back into the slot.

No doubt the "here we go again" thing crept into her mind but that's when her sense of steely resolve took over.

When she got to the Birdcage, finishing second last, behind the Paul Nelson-trained Kings Deep and ahead of Craig Lupton-trained Stainley, her parents, Annette and Darryl Conder, were the first to congratulate her on her achievement.

"It doesn't matter where I finished. I'm just happy to finish and he's my favourite horse," Conder said of her affiliation with I'll'ava'alf, a 6-year-old Bay gelding she has been riding for the past four years.

Not surprisingly her parents initially weren't thrilled with her ride yesterday.

"They always knew I was going to be determined to get back up there," she said, after winning a class in the Horse of the Year Show here in March and finishing runner-up in the showhunter junior rider championship.

She was still lying in a hospital bed a week after the accident when she revealed her intentions. It didn't help that she was booked to go to Melbourne to become a stable hand for Lance Noble.

"Everyone thought I was crazy.

"I rode trackwork so I wanted to have a go so [Matamata trainers] Karen and Kevin Fursdon got me my amateur licence," she explained yesterday, revealing she was supposed to ride a fortnight after the mishap.

The third-year Waikato University hospitality and human resource management student has no intentions of becoming a professional jockey.

"I have a goal of one day running all the huge racecourses around the world," she said, long realising that at 57kg she is too heavy to be making the cut of 49kg for an apprentice jockey.

JOB DONE: Paxton Conder after her maiden race. PHOTO/Anendra Singh

She has exorcised her demons now, mindful her injury will never be 100 per cent again although she isn't ruling out having a go at amateur riding on turning 21.

Any romantic notions she's had about racing while watching it on TV have now given way to a dose of realism.

"It's nothing compared to what it is out there. I have now seen both sides.

"I've always watched racing and just wanted to do that and suddenly today I got a chance to do it and I realised how not so easy it is to do it," she said with a smile.

When she got to the starting line, she simply wanted to accomplish the goal of finishing.

Conder doesn't know where she got the burning desire to feed her equine need for speed.

Her father is a mechanic although her mother used to do trackwork in her heyday.

"I just want to give a huge thank you to Karen today and everything she's done for me."

Conder's mother named her after the protagonist in the fictional Message From Nam, which romantic novelist Danielle Steel wrote and Dell Publishing released in October 1990.

"No one agreed with mum's choice of names, especially my grandparents," she said with a grin.

The novel follows the story of Paxton Andrews, who is stationed in Vietnam as a journalist during the Vietnam War, focusing on the men she encounters and how her life and the lives of the people she encounters are changed forever.

Andrews' heart has been broken numerous times, having lost her father, two lovers and a well-loved nanny.

On her third trip to Saigon as a journalist she finds a love that will not fade away.